Simple improvisation tricks for murder mystery beginners

Thursday, July 28th, 2016 at
3:17 pm

At Murder Mystery, all our stories are designed to be highly enjoyable to first time sleuths and experienced detectives alike, which means that there are various parts of the night where you’ll need to improvise your way to the truth (or, indeed, hide it). It’s simply a fact that people either love or hate improvisation – you may find it thrilling or you may end up flustered and stuttering. If you belong to the second category of people, we’ve compiled some simple improve tricks that’ll help you remain cool under the pressure.

If you’re a beginner to murder mystery dinners, we’ll generally find you an easy character to play. This character is usually an outsider to the situation, with little or no relationships to the other characters involved. Whilst this means you have to build up relationships between characters on the go, it does mean you don’t have to worry about remembering pre-existing facts.

The most important rule when it comes to murder mystery dinner improvisation is do not make anything up about another character that the person playing that character doesn’t know about. This can end up creating an awful mess for a wide range of characters. Instead, why not work with the murder mystery team to create a full back story that could give you resources for solving the mystery, whilst still ensuring everyone’s having fun?

Many murder mystery characters are respectable members of society, such as solicitors, businessmen or even nobility. As the story goes on, few characters are what they seem, and if you need to keep people off your back, you can use deflection to excuse times when you’re not in the room or even your actions. Some examples of this include:

Doctors and lawyers can claim patient/client confidentiality to withhold information

If your character is an alcoholic, you can claim you blacked out during a particular event

Businessmen can turn away enquiries from other characters by simply stating they have staff members who will deal with it.

This gives you vital time to talk to a member of the murder mystery team to ask their advice on what to do next. Something you should remember is that not every character will take the brush-off, so try to have some excuses to back up your actions, or lack thereof. Experienced murder mystery attendees love these moments, because they get really interesting, and can even lead to them winning the game!

One of the best ways to make progress with the game, however, is to work with other players to take down who you think is the murderer, or to get vital information from an unwilling party. Pooling your knowledge helps you to build a fuller picture…..but then again, who can you really trust?